The Singles Jukebox

Rollercoaster ride in the chill lane…

[Video]
[7.43]

Jel Bugle: I like that it’s a mix of styles — starts all glitchy, and then Rosalia does a nice bit of singing with acoustic guitars. Ralphie’s autotune bit seems superfluous, a bit of a passenger. I worried a lot that Rosalia was going to lose the fur hat on the roller coaster.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pretty, plaintive, and slight.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Big fan of the Coverdale Page guitars. After hearing Rosalía’s vocals shift so effortlessly between airy and foreboding, I was skeptical what Ralphie Choo could possibly bring to this, but his lower register is a valuable counterweight. (Until we get to the laughable Celine Dion line.) Lastly: does she know?
[8]

Mark Sinker: Does Rosalía know what omega means? Do we? Even ignoring the wolf-bondage stuff (a good thing to ignore, especially with Ralphie Choo as the Céline Dion of the situation) it’s mainly a way to say “you’re my first and and my last” (and you have to couple it with alpha to make this work). Does this matter? I want to say “never fact-check a declaration of devotion” — and this even despite all the historical unhappiness that fact-checks might have helped people avoid. I also want to say that even if the Céline Dion of the situation’s voice is a bit meagre, Rosalía’s is honestly gorgeous. Let this prettiness stand in dynamic apposition to my small-minded pettiness. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: Given how the rest of the track feels so clearly structured and sang as a genuinely stirring, sincere ballad, it’s kind of wild that those little munchkin-voiced “tell me that you care, you care, you care” don’t mess up the vibe more. Mostly due to Rosalía’s vocal performance, Choo is just kind of there in comparison. However, [CELINE DION MENTIONED]
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Ralphie Choo didn’t need to be here, but he doesn’t take much away from the affair, giving Rosalía a sentimental vocal showcase backed by a guitar that was always going to speak to me. It just needs to stop adding things and recognize it peaks in the second chorus.  
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Practicing love is a funny thing. You have to dive all in, ask the difficult questions of yourself you don’t answer, learn to pay the mortgage on time and start stressing about that too. And you even have to reckon with even if the person, persons or yourself is worth it. Most of the time it’s yes. half the time it’s no. The rest is so murky that usually most relationships of any kind evaporate once these murky waters appear. Sometimes, you get so deep in that when you realize they don’t actually want to keep making that investment, it’s often too late. But within this brief bubble of bright, vivid Technicolor, your desire to make that investment, that first step, that deeply vulnerable act of letting a part of you be know, then showing more as time goes on, is rewarded, it is buoyed, it stirs you deeply. Rosalía’s engagement to Rauw Alejandro unfortunately was made available on the belief it could survive our desire to see it fail and our excitement to see it succeed. Her voice oozes tenderness, joy, warmth, willingness to open up her heart once more to us. The result, however, is up to us.
[10]

no blergs » Friday, October 11th, 2024 11:53 pm

Accelerating right to the top of our charts…

[Video]
[8.44]

Ian Mathers: I hadn’t forgotten “What It Is,” but this one hits like Doechii wants me to. Two minutes (and it feels like it’s that long because the job is done, not for some algorithm), high intensity, great delivery, and I think even a better chorus. Definitely the only earworm I’ve heard in a while prominently featuring the phrase “face fuck.”
[9]

Alfred Soto: With Rapsody and Noname releasing excellent work in the last two years, we’re living in a fecund time for female-identifying singer-rappers. “Nissan Altima” proves she can do the slither-tongued swagger as well as anyone. “I’m the trap Grace Jones,” she admits after a trip to Spain results in tsunami-ing someone’s vagina.
[9]

Mark Sinker: It’s like you can’t say “cunnilingus dalai lama” without me handing myself over to a Doechii YouTube deep-dive for hours on end, happy as a dim little lamb in some Cenobite Hellraiser dimension. Sometimes she’s even gentle and charming, like the director dropping out of character to explain the logic of a move. Not here though — and anyway those are never the best bits, though they are the most reassuring. The best is when her mind is flashing at frightening speed and the words and voicings and just grunts are breaking open into unexpected hidden corridors, running at angles behind the walls to energies you didn’t quite want to imagine, maybe. 
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: It took me several (exuberant) listens to figure out what this reminds me of: the sparkly instrumentals and kinetic charismatic presence of early Azealia Banks, except better because to my knowledge Doechii is not a rampaging drama-seeking TERF.
[9]

Al Varela: You know, we’ve had such a rough streak of terrible fast raps from Eminem and Eminem wannabes lately that it’s easy to forget how fun fast raps can be when it’s done well. Doechii immediately jumps in with this roller-coaster flow in the first verse after the chorus that’s so infectious that if the song was just that verse and two choruses I would have been satisfied. But the second verse is just as good! Doechii is such a firespitter and some of her pop concessions make me forget that sometimes. Glad to have a song where she truly proves herself and reminds us she can and will take over the rap game when the time is right.
[9]

Jel Bugle: A short rap song, not too bad. I liked the brief acapella bits, and change of speed. 
[6]

Will Adams: Initially the brief run-time felt unsatisfactory. But when you pack as many scorching lines (and line deliveries) as Doechii does in “Nissan Altima”‘s 120 seconds, who cares?
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Even when listened to with intent, the refrain registers not as individual words but as a percussive barrage of obscenity, which is more or less how Doechii wants it. It can still be diagrammed if you’re into that, but its purpose is to soften you up for the more stylish and surgically targeted body blows to follow. She’s unsparing yet economical with her flows, always giving the impression that there’s more to her than what she’s choosing to reveal at the moment. She uses the breaks in the instrumental to fool you into thinking a beat switch is coming — it never does — but when it starts up again the beat feels slightly fresher than it did a few seconds ago. “Give us nothing,” but unironically.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: All rise and put your sticks up for the motherfucking Princess and that short ass second verse.
[10]

1 blerg » Friday, October 11th, 2024 7:45 pm

Making their very first Jukebox appearance…

[Video]
[7.00]

Ian Mathers: I wasn’t exactly waiting for new material from the Cure, but I still find myself feeling very sickos.jpg about the three-and-a-half minute instrumental slowcore intro here. Smith sings exactly like he always has, thank fuck, sounding wracked with anguish over the inexorable, weighty trudge of the song. The funniest possible thing would be for some snippet of this to just blow up on TikTok.
[7]

TA Inskeep: Finally, new Cure music that sounds like classic Cure. That long intro, the extended keyboard chords, those guitar textures, and Robert Smith sounding despondent: yes please! As a Cure fan going back close to 40 years, “Alone” is everything I hoped for from their first new music in 16.
[9]

Alfred Soto: The synths coast alongside the guitars like fighter jets leading a passenger jet to a runway, while the drums pound their irregular patterns. The slow opening crawl — how Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me of them. “This is the end of every song we’ll sing,” Robert Smith lies. Not so long as he can thatch his hair, apply moist lipstick, keep his global audience, and keep writing and singing songs this confidently.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: I like the depressive realism here: the long awaited musical comeback as an occasion for apocalyptic dread rather than celebration. “We’re older, we’re frailer, we missed the boat, we’ll never be able to match your favorite album from 1987 because we lack the nervous, buzzing urgency that glued us to our audience at a time when rock music was still the lingua franca of youth; please buy our merch.” Bracingly honest! But it’s one thing to assign conceptual purpose to a three-minute opener of dense ambient murk, and another to make the listener intuitively feel that purpose, in between wondering why the snare is so dang loud.
[5]

Jel Bugle: I saw that lots of people were excited for the return of the Cure, like Gandalf swooping in at Helm’s Deep. I contemplated muting the word “Cure” just so I wouldn’t say anything mean about them, and I could keep my pals. I guess it has an epic feel, and I’m sure all the Cure fans will love it — you’ve got to give the people what they want, after all. If, like me, you quite like “Friday I’m In Love” and that’s as far as you go with the Cure, then you are not gonna go crazy for this one. Sounds like a deep cut of an obscure album that is 3% of Cure fans’ favourite. 
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: I’ve probably walked past a person who’s died every day I’ve lived in Brooklyn. Sometimes, I looked them in the eyes and scurried away, trying not to think of my own oncoming demise and soothing my wounded heart with the lie that there was nothing I could have done. But there often is something — sometimes just staying and talking them through it can be enough. In the end, each of us is alone, waiting for our life to ebb out of us. Those are the lucky ones. There aren’t even a lot of lyrics in this song, Robert Smith’s voice cries out in pain and despair as per usual and fades. But for the first three minutes, the band coalesces, the two chords constantly playing then resolving with riffing atop the mix, the snare cracking loudly in the corner, the piano tiptoeing towards the top then receding, but still, no voice. By the time Smith’s voice appears, you have seen through the mind’s manipulative trick and wail, gnash your teeth, howl, but your body won’t fight anymore. As you finally accept your fate, the fluorescent lights start shutting down, the tables collapse. your heart slows, your lungs go flat, your mind shuts down. In the empty void, you finally stop being you. you finally stop being.
[9]

Mark Sinker: Nearly 50 years since I first heard Bob sing: late night, I’m guessing, on the John Peel show, snuggled up under my bedclothes with my little handheld radio (a cartoon cliché that is also actually true). The Cure were disdained by the music press at the time so I wanted not really to like them — I was a very suggestible teenager this way — except secretly I did like them. What did I like most? The keening flat gloom in Bob’s voice — which for some reason I’ve never really identified brought me great joy. The group is very funny. Do they mean to be? Does this matter? The joy may be extremely goofy but it’s also extremely reliable: live versions of “A Forest” for hour on hour on hour, stretching out over days, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year (to where the goth dreams are). “Alone” is only six minutes long, but the three minutes Bob takes to start is an endearing nod to those long-ago live versions (and how we tested him about them). And it’s soooooo slooooow, and that’s pretty funny too. This is just Cure stuff: sometimes they are the Platonic form of themselves. I look into my heart and I find that one-note ridiculous as they’ve always been, I really do love them, after all. Here at the end of all things, as they say.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: I will never stop loving songs so unabashedly sweeping, so full of sea-tossed dramatics, that they make a several-minutes-long, only subtly changing instrumental loop — see also Stina Nordenstam’s “CQD” — sound like the heavily truncated edit of a song large enough to span the entire world.
[9]

Aaron Bergstrom: I’ve never really gotten into weighted blankets, but for the people who love them, this is how I imagine it must feel. Whether it’s the weight of the drums or the weight of mortality, we’re all here because we want to get crushed by something.
[8]

1 blerg » Friday, October 11th, 2024 7:27 pm

Not an attempted revival of the sea shanty trend but rather some lovely folk-pop!

[Video]
[7.12]

Hannah Jocelyn: I stumbled upon Gigi Perez in 2022 and she blew me away with her voice, which cut through the high-budget Manny Marroquin mixes she got at the time. Perez’s contralto is obviously indebted to Jeff Buckley and more modern contemporaries like Lucy Dacus and Gordi, but her recent songs have her singing from a more nasal, high-pitched register that complements the more direct lyrics. From the first few seconds, that risk pays off: no better way to open a sailor song than sounding like a siren! The similar melody in the choruses and verses shouldn’t work, but make for an incredibly easy sing-along, like a campfire song lovesick lesbians. Some have compared this to other 2010s indie folk, but if there’s a 2010s indie folk song with a line as feral and fanfic-ready as “She took my fingers to her mouth/the kind of thing that makes you proud/that nothing else ever worked out”, I’d love to hear it. No, Hozier doesn’t count.
[9]

Mark Sinker: For other uses, see Anne Hathaway (disambiguation).
[8]

Ian Mathers: I’m a big fan of voice-and-acoustic-guitar production where they just whack a mess of effects on there until the whole thing attains a pleasing mass; on headphones my whole brain feels like it’s reverberating to some divine frequency. I’m especially fond of what the saxophone adds here (including at the beginning) and how intense and specific most of the lyrics are; “the kind of thing that makes you proud that nothing else had ever worked out, worked out” is a haymaker.
[9]

Jel Bugle: Once upon a time I might have liked this kind of thing. It’s a bit generic really — shimmery acoustic shoegaze, I’d probably like it more if it were in a different language, as I quite like Japanese/Brazilian shoegaze stuff. I liked the trumpet-ity bit at the end, so a bonus point for that! 
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Moving the 2010s nostalgia doomsday clock 5 seconds closer to midnight.
[4]

Alfred Soto: I’ve never tasted a sailor but I’ve checked one out! Gigi Perez’s intensity suggests they’re a lot of fun — she thinks of sailors when her lover sticks Perez’s fingers in her mouth. The cumulative intensity complements the melodic sameness. By the time it’s over it’s as if we peeked into a friend hooking up.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: “Humans are endlessly fascinating,” he mumbles to himself while scrolling idly through the YouTube comments.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Adoration, obsession, projection; those are not love. They fade, or worsen, then are shorn once the things that inflamed them have withered away. Most of us live in relationships built on one or two or even all three, then when it fades we blame them for not being who we wanted them to be instead of accepting them. The vulnerable struggle to find those they can trust, the manipulative choose to lure them in then condemn them from saving them from themselves. But what does a random stranger on the internet know about love? I do know I wish for this, despite doing everything in my power to prevent anyone from choosing me. I can relate to having nobody to love you with their chest, until they’re gone and you realize you let those bonds fray and despoil, now weak and thin, little worms eating through the soil that connected us. I desire love, I crave it, yet I do nothing to find it, nurture it, or even feed it other than the faintest, lightest touches. I am no sailor, simply a landlubber with chlorine pool sea legs who can’t bring himself to crawl atop the waves through the muck to find someone who would want me to be a part of their life. I know there are, but that’s different from cultivating them. I write about my personal desire and fear of love since the lyrics in this song firmly and gently shut me out — it’s not meant for me, someone will appreciate this more. Unfortunately I’ll be 43 one day and that’s not good enough for me. Gigi was willing to put all these messy feelings into this song and send it out there into the world for pennies to receive pennies; all I can do is scrawl on a scratched up laptop. But I’m willing to scrawl until I can finally close it, gird myself, try to spark a conversation with anyone who’d like to talk. We can go forever until you want to sit it out. 
[10]

no blergs » Friday, October 11th, 2024 1:29 am

In a red solo cup, perhaps?

[Video]
[3.22]

Ian Mathers: Barring a couple of minor signifiers this does not sound like country music; it sounds like the theme music for the most excruciatingly boring sitcom the “golden age” of ad-supported network TV ever produced.
[0]

Taylor Alatorre: I don’t know why Post would risk nationwide schadenfreude by carping about a close Cowboys loss, only to forgo regional specificity in the very next line by mentioning I-65 instead of I-45. I guess the thinking is that Texas pride doesn’t sell as well as a denuded Southern or heartland identity — except that Beyoncé and Miranda Lambert exist, and Twisters managed to spin box office gold out of its Oklahoma mythmaking. I stand by my prediction that F-1 Trillion was not going to be a Kid Rock re-enactment, because Kid, like him or not, never laid himself under the Nashville hydraulic press to this extent. In his heart, Post has to know that this isn’t the only way, that real country boys are out here doing collabs not only with out-the-mud rappers, but with Underoath and A Day to Remember and the meme dude from Attack Attack!, that the stars were aligned for this project to be something other than replacement-level. His overriding desire to Become Product leaves all such options greyed out, which, under a more generous light, could be viewed as the self-sublimating act of a humble pre-Renaissance artisan. Ego death in the service of the ultimate tailgate, sponsored by Raising Cane’s.
[4]

Will Adams: If the prominent Bud Light placement in the video isn’t evidence enough of this song’s hollow center, consider how the cynicism in both Post’s and Blake’s performances is already apparent even before the dozens of bowl halftime shows they will undoubtedly be booked to play this at.
[2]

Al Varela: Guess I should have expected that Post Malone’s foray into country music would just be a trojan horse for Nashville to pitch their usual fare to a mainstream audience. I’d be more irritated if I didn’t begrudgingly really like this. A lively fiddle and sweeping organ alongside Post Malone’s expert chorus craftsmanship is an easy way to win me over with even the most generic country radio slop. Blake Shelton and Post Malone have like, no chemistry together but you know what they sound good on the hook so I wouldn’t turn down that drink from either of them.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s good to see some, just, well,  know their place. On an unrelated note, where is my cranberry canape?
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: To my great regret, I must note that I was unfair to Morgan Wallen a few months ago. As I heard it — nearly every time I went outside this summer, all up and down the west coast — “I Had Some Help” grew on me, an unwanted song of the summer affixing itself like a parasite to the various systems of my mind. I cannot be quite convinced that it’s good but I likewise cannot be made to hate it; the strange chemistry between Post’s reedy, saintly fuck-up and Wallen’s honking misanthrope turns the song into a diptych far more compelling than originally intended. Case in point: Blake Shelton absolutely does not have the juice here, sounding for all the world like someone’s uncle doing karaoke to a Blake Shelton song. Without an interesting foil, the entire Post Malone country enterprise capsizes; the guy seems pleasant enough but as he ambles through these verses my patience for his schtick erodes quickly.
[3]

Alfred Soto: When Miranda Lambert made the grisly mistake of thinking she could spend her life with Blake Shelton, his glass-eyed mien gave the game away. She had married a streetlight that would never know the pleasure of a dog pissing on him. In this standard it’s-5 o’clock-somewhere thumper he makes Post Malone sound like George Jones.
[4]

Jel Bugle: A straightforward country song about typical country music things — drinking and travelling about, drinking too much, and the need for another drink. A kind of escapism.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: I cannot imagine this playing anywhere that alcohol is served.
[3]

no blergs » Thursday, October 10th, 2024 11:35 pm

Forever ’til the end of time…

[Video]
[7.70]

Ian Mathers: First part: I do wish more pop music sounded like its makers had heard “Windowlicker” at least once, yeah. Second part: why does it suddenly feel like we’re freefalling without a parachute? Third part: you know what, they should have gone with “braindance” back in the day.
[8]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Everyone should burn down their place of work and host a rave inside its charred shell. This song is so fucking good. Twigs can do whatever she wants forever. 
[9]

Will Adams: The office choreo clip that kept bouncing around my timeline upon the video’s release was a fake-out; the stuttering boom-boom beat in the prelude is a separate song entirely, “Drums of Death.” “Eusexua” proper is breathtaking in the way the best trance music is: strobing, nervous, euphoric all at once. The titular concept would seem overwrought were it not explicated as flawlessly as Twigs does here. Her voice is suspended in mid-air as the track swirls around her, until everything falls away and she is lifted to that higher state.
[9]

Jel Bugle: It’s ponderous, and I had to google what “eusexua” is: “a state of being” and “the pinnacle of human experience.” I didn’t really get to the summit of human experience with this one – it’s kinda Perrie Edwards x Yeule, and I feel this leaves a sort of electronic slop. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that gets played in a club, rather than on a cold drizzly afternoon, The last 40 seconds are good, where it’s more disjointed and ethereal. That should have been the whole song.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Putting my editor’s cap on: Twigs used 167 words to describe the indescribable “eusexua” when one word existed and would suffice, “ecstasy.” Zero words, even, would suffice: the last part of this song.
[8]

Mark Sinker: Listening to this engenders a state of being and the description of that state of being is: pleasant! In a somewhat nervous and spooky way! It’s not really a new state of being though, because I’ve heard other songs by FKA Twigs. It seems a vaguely needless pressure for everyone to invent a whole new word for it.  
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: FKA Twigs is bad at naming things, including herself, but this is known. The syllables comprising “Eusexua” are an obstacle of her own making, which is apt for a song that portrays its (unfortunately) titular feeling as a state that must be fought and clawed for, even against one’s better judgment. As depicted, the ascent to transcendence is a rather bumpy one, speckled with earthly crevices and frictions — those chittering little clacks against the temple are what deny us an early exit from crass materiality. Twigs dances around her definitions because she knows that, despite what she says at one point, to transcribe would only tether her down further. She trusts in her voice, and its wide range of contortions, to do the real semantic lifting, and the trust pays itself back. Our reward for following her on this ersatz Eightfold Path is a guiltless surrender to the simple joys of trance, not in scare quotes but in full hands-up glory. It can’t last forever, of course, but just long enough to have made the journey worth it under any name.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Maybe my standards are too high for her — at this point, I expect masterworks from Twigs every time, songs that will stop you in your tracks through novel stylistic choices or sheer emotive weight. “Eusexua” is instead merely a case of well-executed contemporary sophistipop, hitting all of the right semi-nostalgic synth tones and rhythms to feel like a moment of ecstasy on the dancefloor. Even when it slows down I don’t get any more out of it; she phones it in a little, which is to say she does better than most working pop musicians. 
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: I already felt constantly alone. It’s my own damn fault. I’m getting older, so it’s my job to fix it. That is when you reach eusexua. You finally hit the end of your excuses, rationalizations, punching up and down and delusions, and you swim free into your own eusexua. Fear is a common process — it happens often when others are trying to drown you with their own despair — but fear not; eusexua is here for them too. Look past yourself to see the despair and regret you constantly feel just for existing reflected in another’s eyes; pull them too into eusexua. Eusexua will be our freedom, our community, our life. You will not have to be rich, you will not have to be handsome, you will be healed of your disabilities and difficulties, you will need no power or gratification, you will become part of us, and be a greater whole that will have you complete and loved. You will finally have help.
[10]

Alfred Soto: Putting aside my FKA Twigs skepticism was easy: I’m a sucker for boom-clap stutterbeats. She channels K-pop and Fever Ray for the sake of inhabiting a reasonable facsimile of euphoria. She’s always been reasonable.
[7]

1 blerg » Thursday, October 10th, 2024 8:00 pm

the xx but it’s not called the xx but it’s not not the xx

[Video]
[6.67]

Nortey Dowuona: the xx reunion (neutral)
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Poses as the reverse of the Ship of Theseus — what if the band broke up but kept all of its same parts, making the same kind of music? Maybe this is reading too hard into the feature credit tea leaves, but “Waited All Night” feels in subtle ways weirder and more disjoint than the median xx single, less a carefully manicured garden and more something overgrown and unruly. Jamie’s production threatens to swallow up the two vocalists, deep thrums of the bass jockeying for position. It’s a better xx song than the xx, formally speaking, could be expected to make at this late date, a clever not-even-a-disguise that allows for something great.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Reuniting with his pals for a dance jam, Jamie xx snaps and crackles the beats, speeds up the tempos, and coaxes Romy into cooing “Could I be this close to you?” like Tracey Thorn three decades ago, tired and drunk in the club but awake enough for possibilities.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: There’s a trick here where a vocal sample becomes a staccato Nile Rodgers guitar in my ear. It punches at the same weight as the drums under Romy and Sim’s flowing vocals, adding something frenetic even as it repeats.
[9]

TA Inskeep: Even though all three xx members are on this, this doesn’t sound like the xx. It sounds like Jamie xx’s solo work, just with vocals from Romy (whom I feel is the spiritual daughter of Alison Goldfrapp) and Oliver Sim. I’m a sucker for a well-made, subtly throbbing late-night house record, precisely what this is. 
[8]

Jel Bugle: Adult Contemporary Dance Music, the kind of music I just don’t like – it’s clinical and lacking any kind of joy for me. I am not going to the club, and I am not going to dance. 
[1]

Kat Stevens: It seems fair to expect Jamie xx to produce some gloomy textured beats to accompany the scene where a miserable protagonist is sat on the platform at Hackney Central, pointedly ignoring the trains and passengers streaming past at 10x speed, slowly looking down and cupping their chin in their hands and regretting their life choices. It also seems fair that I’d much rather listen to the shameless weekend-finally-here euphoria that is somehow also on the Jamie xx album.
[5]

Ian Mathers: It’s not that the appeal of the xx eludes me; every time I’ve listened to them I feel like I should enjoy them more. If they made a whole record that sounded like this, I feel like I might get there.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Immaculate set filler. Fade it after Romy’s verse.
[7]

no blergs » Wednesday, October 9th, 2024 11:12 pm

Mos Def’s daughter gets a TikTok hit — no, come back…

[Video]
[6.18]

Julian Axelrod: “The self-produced bedroom pop nepo baby who went viral after being sampled on a 15-person Cash Cobain posse cut is good, actually” is an unbearable sentence, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. If “Espresso” is the beverage-based hook of the year, “I got the juice/Passion fruit and guava juice” is a close second.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Any song whose thesis is “I don’t give a shit” has to answer for itself; why did you write a whole song if you’re so over it, huh? Most fail at this. Laila attacks this particular slope by writing half a song. “Not My Problem” has the air of something chopped and screwed together in an afternoon; the one-measure loop of reverberating synth arpeggi, the stream-of-consciousness tropical fruit catalogue, the beat that consists of a single, ugly little kick drum thrown dry and uncompressed in the middle of the room. Success at the first hurdle: I believe wholeheartedly that you are over it. Second hurdle: would I ever listen to this faint gesture of a tune more than, like, twice?
[6]

Ian Mathers: A commendable message and production that makes a virtue of menacing, nocturnal stasis. Whether this works for you might come down to how you feel about songs with lyrics that feel about 90% song title by weight.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: There’s a spare yet fully realized track on Gap Year! that has an “(interlude)” parenthetical despite being two seconds longer than this one. It is unclear why the reverse should not be true. Is a Cash Cobain remix really worth this much?
[2]

Alfred Soto: Borrowing an amapiano tip-tap for its drum loop and a maximalist synth line from one of Billie Eilish’s psychodramas, “Not My Problem” puts its trust in its repetitions. The grain in Laila!’s voice suggests not defensiveness so much as affirmation. She’s serious about being taken seriously. Snatch her guava juice, and she’ll fuck you up. 
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Redolent equally of amapiano and Rihanna’s ANTI in its immersive, sink-into-able atmosphere. Nepo is good actually?
[8]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: It drones on without droning, keeping you moving as you stand in the same place, trapping you in molasses at the very end, the constant refrain washing the stickiness off.
[6]

Jel Bugle: Was a bit surprised by the number of streams, 33 million — I’ve heard similar things with 1K streams. Very computer music: it’s like the new lo-fi, people still in their bedrooms making songs, but not a 4-track to be seen. It has an amateurish charm, and as an expression of joy at making music it’s nice, but not gonna buy the CD.   
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Occupies a fun double-life — melodically and lyrically, this is basically a song you would sing to yourself as you do the dishes. In practice, Laila!’s charm as a vocalist and her tense, spare production creates a sort of halo around the song, taking it from petty, passing grievance to a grander statement of independence.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Still can’t think of us as humans? Still can’t accept the multiplying sexual and gender identities in the world now? Can’t accept now that black on both sides is old enough to buy himself a ticket to fly to Accra now, and you are even older than that? Well….
[10]

Kayla Beardslee: Totally lacking personality, ambition, or intent. Why is she singing about guava juice? Girl, check your ingredients before you start blending!
[4]

no blergs » Wednesday, October 9th, 2024 10:50 pm

In which we are raged against…

[Video]
[5.11]

Ian Mathers: To the extent that Linkin Park ever were/are cool, it’s at least partly because they absolutely do not seem to care if some people find them cringey. The teenagers (and others) who resonated with “One Step Closer” et al, and now find that the lyrics here touch on the pain and grief of living in our increasingly/eternally dystopian times, don’t need the band to be less sincere. Recruiting a new singer who was inspired to both sing and scream via her love of Hybrid Theory (and who has apparently distanced herself from Scientology, or else my tone would be… different), but who doesn’t sound like she’s just doing a Chester Bennington imitation, is probably about the only way to handle this short of going the Shinoda-only route. Slightly to my surprise, I find that I’m happy they’re back.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Aptly titled.
[3]

Mark Sinker: Genius dot com tells me this song is about the CRITICS and how all they want to do is TAKE YOU DOWN — but I prefer to believe that it’s an intransigent Adorno-esque critique of administrated present-day life, its lures and its hells. Emily Armstrong has the kind of voice I unreservedly love (and Mike Shinoda does not). 
[7]

Harlan Talib Ockey: No one else is ever going to sound like Chester Bennington, and the (poorly-considered) choice of Emily Armstrong implies that Linkin Park wasn’t looking for an impressionist anyway. But their first single with a vocalist who is very audibly not Bennington is the blandest possible version of Linkin Park, including the right ingredients to show fans they’re still the same band while filing off just enough serial numbers that it doesn’t sound retrograde. There aren’t any concessions to Armstrong’s vocal style or musical influences, either of which could’ve made this less slick and more distinctive. I do appreciate how Linkin Park has grown up with their listeners, as the teens raised on Hybrid Theory are now the prime age for an anthem against soul-sucking corporate adulthood — that still understands audience calibration and brand identity.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The frustrating part about the brouhaha about Emily Armstrong is that whatever her affiliations, she understands becoming part of a cult formed out of the wound of abuse and the agony of cutting yourself out. We are only social creatures, many of us choosing unhealthy groups to find our own identities, only for the lucky few to get free and enter a healthy community — or, more likely, loneliness again. Perish a thought for those who can never get free.
[7]

Jel Bugle: I like their new singer, she’s adding some much needed energy – I’m not sure if Mike’s opening lines were deliberately dreary, to highlight Emily’s power? Anyway, it’s a smart move by Linkin Park. Musically, it’s alright, not that exciting – they should go more metalcore rather than pop nu-metal. But as a radio-friendly unit shifter, this will do well! Music for traffic jams.
[6]

Jeffrey Brister: I liked them more when they were “Refused for teens who have absolutely no idea who the fuck Refused is.”
[1]

Taylor Alatorre: Packaging your radically rebooted line-up in an unadorned riff repeater is the alt-rock version of the median voter theorem — you can’t be seen as going too far too fast, and reassurances must be given to key voting blocs. Of all potential compromises, though, this one is far from the worst, and it reinforces the band’s preferred narrative in subtle ways. The dry, compacted production lends the feeling of a group restarting from scratch, huddling in the proverbial garage as they try to figure out what works and what doesn’t, which elements are central to the Linkin Park sound and which are secondary. The album title From Zero nods to the band’s late-’90s predecessor, and there is indeed a sense of pre-history here, mixed with alternate history — what if Hybrid Theory was the sophomore sellout album, and this was what the originalists had clamored for all along? It’s an intriguing little fantasy, and it becomes more credible when Emily Armstrong is given her cue to explode, fulfilling in an instant the dreams of a generation by making a million bedroom cover songs canon. The lyrics are not so transferable, though, given how clearly LP-centric they are — no one could ever think that “your favorite point of view” is about overbearing parents or high school backbiters. But it would be absurd to a expect a “view from nowhere” account from a band whose identity is suddenly a melee free-for-all.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: More like the empty content machine. The band couldn’t have predicted — or, at least, hopefully didn’t predict — that the “fuck the haters” lyrics would sound offputtingly defensive in the context of the Emily Armstrong backlash. (It’s irritating how people see her as some rando and not the frontwoman of a long-running band, but man, between that and later singles, Dead Sara’s reputation has just cratered.) But given that Armstrong’s role here seems to be sounding as much like Chester Bennington as possible, was it all necessary?
[5]

1 blerg » Wednesday, October 9th, 2024 8:08 pm

Who is “we”?

[Video]
[3.60]

Harlan Talib Ockey: I pray that someday I’ll be able to score a Coldplay song highly. The generic hype strings make “We Pray” feel like a particularly boring commercial. Or something Hillsong-adjacent, given that the lyrics sound religious, even though this song is about so little I’m not sure they entirely are. The problem with “big idea” songs that try to enumerate everything wrong with the world is that they rarely have room for an actual message. What is “We Pray” trying to say? “I hope literally everything bad gets better soon”? Coldplay does name a few specific things (Virgilio Aguilar Mendez, “Baraye”), but it’s not obvious why Chris Martin connects them here other than the general idea that oppression is bad. Meanwhile, the rest of the lyrics are just vaguely inspirational soup. “Pray that I can lift up, pray my brother is blessed”? What? Elyanna and TINI seem to only be on here for a single line of backing vocals, and Burna Boy is surprisingly scarce too. Little Simz’s verse is as aimless as the rest of the song, and a large chunk of it is verbatim from her feature on Sault’s “Free.” It’s not hard to guess that a song with four featured artists might sound unfocused, but then again, it’s never clear what “We Pray” wanted to tell us in the first place.
[1]

Aaron Bergstrom: Coldplay debuted “We Pray” at Glastonbury, prominently featuring the lyric “pray Virgilio wins,” four months after the state of Florida dismissed all charges against Virgilio Aguilar Mendez. Rare good news from the American judiciary, and you just know Chris Martin believes he somehow deserves some credit for it.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: Don’t worry, Chris, he did! Song’s cool. Simz’ verse is good.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Equating “my friend will pull through” and “Virgilio [Aguilar Mendez] wins” with “some records to play” as prayers is the kind of megastar musician grandstanding we haven’t seen since Bono.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: The near-opposite of Flo Rida’s “I Cry,” a song whose fidgety energy and unassuming nature allowed it to wring a skewed kind of poignancy out of the usual nonsense (as well as sneak an Anders Brevik reference onto Top 40 without anyone noticing). “We Pray” is also founded on placeholder lyricism, but it’s far less kinetic than the Flo Rida kind, and the stilted ballroom pace puts the hollowness of its sentiments front and center. Little Simz and Burna Boy are all too capable of blending into the blandness, which doesn’t help Coldplay but does serve as useful advertising for their own crossover services. Instant global village, just add vocalist.
[3]

Will Adams: Not much of note about this piece of inspiro-dreck besides the fact that Coldplay released a few variants of “We Pray” in which either Elyanna or TINI take the second verse. They also released a version where the second verse is left blank for, in the band’s words, “your own inspiration.” I believe this is a cheap ploy to get people to perform unpaid labor in order to improve their bad song. Don’t fall for it!
[3]

Mark Sinker: No one is ever going to say that Chris Martin has an exciting voice — and maybe that’s alway been the point, why not? Just treat the long-gone Eno era as their true template: this sound and this song as nothing but by-the-yard generative ambient backdrop, with some actual throats and tongues and lips dropped in front of it, to be the real element that you remember. 
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: All of this mustered effort to create something only moderately more interesting than the median late-period Coldplay single. This aims for planetary benefit show largesse but instead feels like what would happen if Civilization got to commission e-sports jock jams the way League of Legends does — grand global gestures, hollow at their core.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Surely he/they can’t need the money, right? Even the bits where more interesting vocalists are performing, this just feels so hollow and perfunctory. It truly takes all kinds, but from over here it’s hard to imagine anyone felt the white-hot heat of artistic inspiration driving them. More like it’s designed to be minimum viable product to keep the Coldplay name alive and then be forgotten.
[3]

Dave Moore: Credibility: borrowed. Feelings: expressed. Dragons: imagined. 
[3]

no blergs » Tuesday, October 8th, 2024 11:40 pm